The present invention is concerned with image processing.
In industrial production environments, most installations and machinery are built according to plans. However, those installations and machinery tend to require upgrading over time and/or are subject to additions which may or may not be appropriately documented.
For certain applications, such as offshore platforms for instance, it is necessary when adding an additional element to be sure that it will fit in the existing installation.
To solve this problem, methods and apparatuses have been proposed to try and obtain “as-built” plans of these installation. Most recently, solutions involving laser photographing apparatuses have been proposed.
Practically, those solutions imply projecting a scanning laser beam on an installation being captured. At each laser position, the distance is derived from the time or the phase difference in the laser to-and-fro path to a reflecting point. After suitably scanning the scene, this results in a three-dimensional set of points, also referred to as “cloud of points”, corresponding to the installation.
However, the cloud of points can only provide a general idea of the contour of the installation to a trained human eye. As far as rigorous planning and designing are concerned, the cloud of points is hardly usable as such.